THE APOLOGY 



OF. AN 



U N&ttLA D v JDix- 



THE 

APOLOGY OF AN UNBELIEVER 



THE 

APOLOGY OF AN UNBELIEVER. 



LOUIS VIAEDOT. 
n 



" The Eternity of the world once admitted, all else follows. 
Sainte Beuve, Letter to the Author. 



Eranslatetf from tfje &f)trti JFrencf) ^Bttton, 

With the consent and approbation of the Author. 



LONDON : 

TRUBNER AND CO., 60, PATERNOSTER ROW. 

1869. 



All Rights reserved. 



Si, a- 



Baden, November, 1866. 

To P 

It has happened to us sometimes, in the course 
of conversation, to touch upon the great questions 
of philosophy. It is not a good plan. Conversa- 
tion is necessarily broken up by interruptions, by 
digressions, by questions and answers. One loses 
continually the line of thought and reasoning. I 
desire to begin and to continue the conversation 
in order to enunciate, in a few concise paragraphs, 
my opinions on these subjects. They have sprung 
from the reflections of a long, honourable, and 
studious lifetime. It is not my fault if these re- 
flections have destroyed, piece by piece, all the 
edifice of ordinary belief (an edifice in which I 
long took shelter), and have reduced me like 
Montaigne, to have nothing whereon to lay my 
head, but the " pillow of doubt/' Far from pro- 
fessing incredulity, I confess it, and seek in all 



vi INTRODUCTION. 

sincerity to justify my unbelief ; and I hasten to 
add, like J. J. Rousseau: — I do not teach my 
opinions, I propound them. 

In this exposition, I promise, not to be as clear 
as I shall be brief, so clear as to be understood by 
a child — that would be insulting to you — but that 
I will put aside all the apparatus of learning, and 
keep to the simple and familiar language of com- 
mon sense. Once more, it is a conversation which 
I ask of you ; but one speaker only will talk, and 
without interruption, 

L. V. 



v THE 

APOLOGY OF AN UNBELIEVEE. 



i. 

In his " Pensees," Alfred de Vigny says, with 
justice, "They talk of faith; what is it, after all, 
this rare thing. I have studied it in every priest 
who said he possessed it, and have found but a 
fervent hope. Certainty — never." 

The priests, and through them, believers in 
general, receive a ready-made system, complete, 
which can satisfy ardent and mystically-inclined 
minds, as well as meek and docile, or even indif- 
ferent ones. A God who created, and who governs 
the world ; an immortal soul, which in another 
and everlasting life will be either recompensed or 
punished; mysteries such as the Trinity,* the 



* Like the Hindoo Trimourti of Brahma, Shiva and 
Vischnou, "who personify the three forms of universal 
existence, creation, destruction, re-appearance." (Ed. Qui- 
net) : like the Egyptian Triad, Osiris, Isis and Horus : like 
those of Plato, of the Druids, etc. 



8 THE APOLOGY OF AN UNBELIEVER. 



Incarnation,* the Redemption, the Eucharist, 
which are believed in, precisely as St. Augustine 
says, quia absurdum.\ Miracles, from that of 
Joshua stopping the sun, or Jesus raising up 
Lazarus, down to St. A polline, through whose 
intercession toothache is cured ; Sacraments which 
obtrude themselves throughout our lives, from 
baptism to extreme unction round about man, 
angels and demons, legends of Paradise, of Pur- 
gatory, and of Hell. This system is complete, it 
is convenient. Believers have learnt it; they 
teach it, they hold to it ; they, believe they be- 
lieve. 

It is our duty to examine. 

On the one hand, in the last and in the pre- 
sent century, in the Profession de Foi du Vicaire 
Savoyard, and in the Religion Naturelle of my 



* Like the Avatar, according to the Brahmins, of Visch- 
nou in the bosom of the Virgin Maia : like the two 
twins brought into the world by the Virgin Teteoinan in 
Mexico, etc. 

t u l do not seek to understand in order to believe," 
said Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury, " but to believe in 
order to understand." His successors, the contemporaries 
of Darwin, Huxley and Tyndall, continue to preach the 
same doctrine. 



OF TTIE CREATION. 



9 



worthy friend Jules Sim on, the spiritualist philo- 
sophers have put forth a vast improvement on 
official Christianity. Although religious, they 
have shown themselves to be sincere, reasonable, 



eternal God, the Creator and Ruler of the world, 
and in an immortal soul, gifted with free will, and 
which will, in another world, be judged accord- 
ing to its works. Upon these two fundamental 
beliefs they found a pure and wise morality, 
capable of consoling and sanctifying our lives, and 
happy, indeed, it seems to me, would mankind be, 
if in its urgent need of some sort of religion, it 
adopted this simple form of a purified Deism. 

I admit it : bnt, as Channing himself, the pious 
apostle of the Unitarians, says, man believes what 
he can, not what he would. He ought to question 
the reason which God has given him, " reason 
that controller-general of all that is within and 
without the vault of heaven " (Montaigne). Our 
Spiritualists themselves say, with pride, " We 
prefer error freely searched for, to truth servilely 
adopted " (Paul Janet, Spiritualisme Franqais). 

Again I say, it is our duty to inquire. 



tolerant, humane. They have sternly rejected 
all superstitions, all absurda. The only positive 
beliefs which they have retained are those in an 




10 THE APOLOGY OF AN UNBELIEVER. 

II. Of the Creatton. 
So long as men believed that their little planet 
was the centre of the universe— that above the 
earth flat and immoveable,* the firmament, alter- 
nately traversed by two great luminaries, " the 
sun to rule by day, the moon by night," formed a 
vault — one understands that they could believe in 
a creation like that related in Genesis. The seven 
days, which are seven periods, have a certain 
agreement with the course of the world's forma- 
tion. Men could then literally admit, for instance, 
the God of the Jews, who walked about in Eden, 
ascended on a cloud, hid Himself behind a bush, 
surrounded Himself, in order to increase His 
majesty, with thunder and lightning, talked 
familiarly with Adam, Cain, Noah, Abraham, 
Jacob, Moses, and did not even take it amiss that 
the Philistines and Amalekites had different gods 
ol their own. But now-a-days, science has pierced 
with a sure glance, the immensity of the heavens, 
and with a no less sure hand has laid down the 

* " I have made the earth like a sheet, and the heavens 
like a tent above it " (Psalms). 

"And Gaia (the earth) produced, first, starry Ouranos (the 
sky), equal to herself, for he covers all her surface " (Hesiod). 

" God has given you the earth for a base, and the 
heavens for an abode " (Koran). 



OF THE CREATION. 



11 



mighty laws which rule the universe. The mere fact 
that the Almanack predicts to an hour the return 
of a tide, of an eclipse, of a comet, demonstrates 
the power of science, and brings it home to the 
most ignorant. She has necessarily shaken the 
obsolete and childish beliefs of primitive humanity. 
When Galileo said, " E pur si muove"* he de- 
stroyed with a word all the theogonies which had 
prevailed among men. Newton, Buffon, Volta, 
Linnaeus, Lavoisier, Lalande, Herschel, Darwin, 
Kirchhof (by these I would designate, astronomy, 
natural science, chemistry, geometry, natural 
history), have completed his work and his victory. 
We now know that this earth is only one of the 
smallest satellites of the sun, — himself, although 
the astronomers give him thirteen hundred 
thousand times the volume of the earth, but one 
of the eighteen thousand little stars which go to 
compose the nebula which, among five or six 
thousand others, is called the Milky Way. And 
each time that we succeed in enlarging the 

* Leon Foucault has made the motion of the earth 
visible and tangible. We might well say of Galileo's ex- 
clamation, what Byron said of a far less important one : — 
" Methinks these are the most tremendous words, 
Since 'Mene, Mene, Tekel/ and 'Upharsin.'" 



12 



THE APOLOGY OF AN UNBELIEVER. 



lens of the telescope, new suns are discovered in the 
depths of the immeasurable ocean of worlds.* 

And we know yet more. The human mind, 
although unable, confined as it is by the limits of 
our senses, to comprehend it, is nevertheless com- 
pelled to admit the infinity of space. The question, 
"What is there on this side, what is there on that?" 
cannot be answered. Draw in thought a line 
through space, stretch it out with all the power of 
your imagination; exhaust the language of arith- 
metic in order to determine its length ; accumu- 
ate millions of figures to express millions of 
leagues; — in vain ; you will not reach the goal ; 
there will always be a plus ultra. For want of an 
assignable and possible limit, we are compelled to 
consider space as infinite. How then admit the 
creation of worlds as infinite as space, without 
beginning, without limits ? Then it is that the 

* That which the telescope shows us in the infinity of 
greatness, the microscope shows us in the infinity of small- 
ness. If there is a star whose light takes several hundred 
thousand years to arrive at the earth, although travelling 
at the rate of 78,000 leagues a second, we should remember 
that thousands of blood globules are contained in a drop 
of our blood, that thousands of infusoriae exist in a drop 
of water, and that thousands of animalcules compose each 
cubic foot of the Paris oolite stone. 



THE CREATION. 



13 



impossibility of a creation strikes on the eye of 
reason, the impossibility of making anything out 
of nothing, and in this case of making everything 
out of nothing. So we see how formidable is the 
truth of the old adage, ex nihilo nihil fit. 

But this line of reasoning is not the only one 
which demonstrates the impossibility of a creation. 
There is another which is, I think, still more 
powerful and still more unavoidable. 

If the infinity of space be admitted, the infinity 
of time must also be granted. They are co- 
relative. If we cannot say, " What is there on 
this side, what is there on that ? " — neither can 
we ask, " What was there formerly, what will 
there be hereafter ?" Time, too, has always its 
plus ultra. Heaping up centuries in time, is like 
heaping up leagues in space ; the one is as in- 
effectual and useless a process as the other. 
Time, then, like space, is without beginning, 
without end, without bounds ; in a word, it is 
infinite. 

All religions have perceived this and have made 
God the Creator, an eternal Being, anterior and 
posterior to time. 

L'Eternel est son nom, le monde est son ouvrage. 

Racike. 



14 THE APOLOGY OF AN UNBELIEVER. 



But when did the Eternal form this work, the 
world? At a given moment of time? This is 
what all the cosmogonies affirm, and what, indeed, 
the very word and idea of creation necessarily 
implies. God then passed all the previous eternity 
in inaction, without acting, without producing, 
without reigning over His works and His crea- 
tures,, as He is held to do during the succeeding 
eternity. But what is an Eternity cut in two? 
How conceive the great Geometer, the Demiourgos, 
the Maker and Ruler of infinite worlds, asleep 
during all the previous eternity, then awaking of 
a sudden, in order to call up this world from 
nothingness, to people this fathomless void, and 
to the universal death to give universal life — to 
make of this nothing all, and to undertake its 
government during a second eternity ? The con- 
tradiction is flagrant. The necessary Being could 
not rest a moment idle; the active and eternal 
Being could never cease eternally acting. If He 
has filled up, without a gap, the infinity of space, 
so, too, He must have filled up, without a blank, 
the infinity of time." 5 * 1 

* An credo in tenebris vita ac mserore jacebat, 
Donee diluxit rerum genitalis origo ? 

Lucretius. 



OF THE CREATION. 



15 



We, therefore, are compelled to admit, that the 
universe, like its Creator, is eternal.* But in al- 
lowing that the universe is eternal, that it is 
co-eternal with God, you allow by that very ad- 
mission that it was not created, creation supposing 
that the workman preceded his work. Now, if 
the world is eternal and uncreated, it created 
itself and is God, and vou are a Pantheist.t In 
any case, the notion of creation strives in vain to 
overcome two insurmountable obstacles, the in- 
finity of space and the infinity of time. On the 



* " Id the economy of the world/' said Hutton, " I can 
find no traces of a beginning, no prospect of an end." — 
(Lyell, Principles of Geology.) 

t " Omnia sunt Deus ; Deus est omnia; creator et 
creatura idem." This was the doctrine which Amaulri 
of Chartres, in the year 1208, left to his followers. The 
priests dug up his body and threw it into the sewer. 

Eschylus had long before said, "Zeus is the earth; Zeus 
is the sky ; Zeus is the whole world, and jez more than 
the world." 

And the Yedas — " Aditi is the sky ; Aditi is the air ; 
Aditi is the father, the mother, and the son ; Aditi is all 
the gods and the five kinds of beings ; Aditi is that which 
has been born, and that which shall be born." 

And Cato in Lucan — "Jupiter est quodcumque vides 
quocumque moveris." 

And the inscription of the veiled Isis — " I am all that is." 



16 THE APOLOGY OF AN UNBELIEVER. 



other hand, "from the eternity of the world all 
else deduces itself/' — Sainte Beuve.* 

" Matter, and the force which belongs to it," 
says Biichner, with Vogt, Moleschott, Feuerbach, 
Virchow, etc., " could not be created, any more 
than they could be destroyed.'' f It is impossible 
that they had a beginning, impossible that they 
will have an end. The two together produce that 
assemblage of phenomena which we call the world. 

Besides, the creation, as a supernatural act, 

* Letter written to the author, 17th April, 1867: — 
" My dear Friend,— I have read your Apology, which ought 
not to take that name, for the wise man has no need to 
defend himself. It is a compte rendu which you make, 
not for others but for yourself. It appears to me exact 
and logical in all points. The creation would be the first 
miracle. The eternity of the world once admitted, all 
else follows. The fixedness of law is a source of conso- 
lation for those who reflect, and, at the same time, a cause 
for sadness. We submit with gravity. This respectful 
and mute gravity of the thoughtful man is, in its way, a 
religion, a homage rendered to the majesty of the universe. 
Our desires, ephemeral and contradictory as they are, 
prove nothing ; they are as clouds which meet at the will 
of the winds, but above them soars and reigns the order 
of the stars. You, my dear friend, are of the religion of 
Democritus, of Aristotle, of Epicurus, of Lucretius, of 
Seneca, of Spinoza, of Buffon, of Diderot, of Goethe, of 
Humboldt. It is good enough company. — Sainte-Beuve." 
t Ex nihilo nihil, in nihilum nil posse reverti. 

Lucretius. 



OF THE CREATION. 



17 



would be a miracle, and of all miracles the most 
miraculous. This very word condemns it, our 
reason no longer admitting of it : either the mira- 
culous does away with science, or science does away 
with the miraculous. We must take our choice.* 
"The science of nature," says M. Ernest 
Havet, 6 ' is essentially non-religious, since religion 
confounds itself with the supernatural." Now 
this science begins to raise the veil which has 
hitherto covered the origin of things. We can 
conceive without difficulty the origin of a planet 
like ours in a period comprising centuries of cen- 
turies. A fragment of a nebula detached from the 
central star, and launched into space; a slight 
paring from the edge of the sun becomes first a 
mass of gas, then of molecules, which the power 
of rotatory motion unites, compresses, agglome- 
rates, sets on fire ; an amalgam of elements in a 
state of fusion ; then, as it cools, the formation of 

* "Every miracle, if proved, would show that the crea- 
tion does not deserve the veneration with which we regard 
it. And the mystic believer must needs infer, from the 
imperfection of the creation, the imperfection of the 
Creator." — B. Cotta. See the Third of J. J. Eousseau's 
Lettres ecrites de la Montague — "Take away the miracles 
of the New Testament, and all the earth is at the feet of. 
Jesus Christ." / 

B 



18 THE APOLOGY OF AN UNBELIEVER. 



a mineral mass, and of the terrestial crust above 
the central furnace; next the condensed vapour 
changes to water, which falls to the surface ; next 
the successive appearance on the surface of the 
earth, watered by springs and rivers— of vegetation, 
more and more diversified and complicated ; lastly, 
ascending the scale of beings, the successive ap- 
pearance of animals, from the polypus to man.^ 

* See the Epogues cle la Nature of Buffon, and the 
Exposition du Systeme du Monde of Laplace. See, too, the 
excellent chapter, entitled " Primitive Generation," in 
Ludwig Buchner's work, Kraft und Stoff; Les Commence- 
menU du Monde, by M. de Jouvencel; La Terre, by M. Elisee 
Reclus, etc. Since one of our loftiest forests would not 
produce, reduced to coal, but a thin bed, little more than 
half an inch thick, it has been calculated that, in order to 
form the thick seams of a coal basin, like that of Northum- 
berland, not less than nine million years would be necessary. 
Yet the coal period is only one, of five or six which preceded 
the historic epoch, that of the appearance of man on the 
earth. As to this period, see the observations of Mr. 
Vivian on Kent's Hole, near Torquay. " A layer containing 
Roman pottery, and consequently 2000 years old, was found 
covered by stalagmites, less than a quarter of an inch thick. 
By comparing this thickness with that of the thicker layers 
of subjacent stalagmites, in which were found shaped bones 
and cut flints mixed up with the remains of great Pachy- 
/ derms, it becomes evident by a comparison of proportions 
/ that man, the contemporary of the rhinoceros and the 
I elephant, existed in England 264,000 years ago." — (Extract 
from the Pensee Nouvelle.) 



OF THE CREATION. 



19 



On the one hand, the decisive discoveries of 
Palaeontology; on the other, organic chemistry, 
no longer confining itself to the decomposition of 
bodies, but defining the formation of composite 
substances ; yet again — an important new law, 
which Epicurus and Lucretius * had, as it were, 
foreseen (the " Origin of Species by Means of 
Natural Selection " of Darwin), which is destined 
to hold in natural history the place of gravitation 
in natural philosophy, by explaining how nature 
gradually rejects the least perfect specimens of 
each species, and even the most imperfect species 
of each genus ; these discoveries enable us to 
conceive the slow and long-enduring process, 
which I should venture to name auto-creation^ 

* De Rerum Natura. Lib. v. 869-75. 

t When we see with what extreme slowness, with what 
successive and gradual endeavours, Nature has formed, 
modified, and perfected things, (" Natura nonfacit saltus" 
said Linnseus), we can only repeat the just reflection of a 
German philosopher — " Whence do animals come ? " he 
asks himself ; and he answers, " The idea that God created 
them by His will is not only unsatisfactory, it is unworthy 
of Him. The grand Soul of the world, which had made 
the Solar System and the Milky Way, could it stoop to 
create experiments on animals, with the intention of re- 
making them if not good enough V — Zimmermann. What 
will the partisans of the biblical cosmogony say to this % 



20 THE APOLOGY OF AjST UNBELIEVER. 



Assuredly those who have seen the natives of 
Australia, with their low foreheads, their pro- 
truding and pendulous bellies, their long spare 
arms, and with minds yet more decrepit than 
their limbs, or, rather, plunged in the deepest 
stupidity, can easily believe that a gorilla can 
change into a man.* And do we not still see 

* At present the Australian race has, so to speak, dis- 
appeared, and among the races which have formerly dis- 
appeared, some might have been found still more akin to 
the animals : for example, the Mailles of Guiana, who 
lived on trees. 

" As we meet with extinct kangaroos and wombats in 
Australia, extinct llamas and sloths in South America, so 
in equatorial Africa, and in certain islands of the East 
Indian Archipelago, may we hope to meet hereafter with 
lost types of the anthropoid Primates, allied to the gorilla, 
chimpanzee, and orang-outang." — Lyell, Antiquity of 
Man, p. 499. 

" If zoological morphology were studied with the pene- 
trating eye of a Goethe, a Cuvier, a Geoffroy, a St, Hilaire, 
think you she would not disclose the secret of the gradual 
development of humanity, that strange phenomenon, by 
which one animal species acquires a decisive superiority 
over the others." — E. Ben an. As the result of his valu- 
able researches in comparative anatomy, Mr. T. H. Huxley 
places man, under the name of " anthropinian," simply 
in the first of the seven families of Primates among ver- 
tebrated animals. " I beg pardon of MM. the Cardinals/' 
says M. Guarin de Vitry, " but the human race, instead of 



OF THE CREATION. 



21 



nations of cannibals two thousand years after 
Plato, eight thousand years after the Egyptian 
dynasty, by whom the great Pyramids were 
built If a planet can form itself in space, 
through the influence of its sun, it can just as 
well destroy itself, either by the exhaustion of its 
heat, or by a cataclysm ; witness the debris of the 
planet pointed out by Kepler, which peoples with 
a crowd of asteroids the space between Mars and 
Jupiter. A sun itself, if it can get on fire (as is 
the supposition concerning certain nebulae), can 
become extinct, and in the universal and eternal 
life its existence of millions of centuries does not 
go for more than the life of a butterfly. Thus is 
demonstrated, from the highest to the lowest 
point of the universe — from the star to the insect 

having come down from heaven, seems rather to have 
risen from the earth, and the monkeys are more nearly 
related to us than the angels/' Hallam says — "If man 
was made in the image of God, he was also made in the 
image of an ape." — Literature of Europe, vol. iv., p. 162. 

* " The western tribes of Indians have not yet quitted 
the primitive stage through which every human race is 
bound to pass at the beginning of its career, that of a 
nomadic people of hunters, the same as in the stone age. 
The Indians, if the whites had not brought them iron, 
would still have weapons of flint, like the antediluvian 
race which peopled Europe, and sheltered itself in caves." 
— L. Simonix, Excursion chez les Peaux-Rouges. 



22 THE APOLOGY OF AN UNBELIEVER. 



— the fatal destiny of every being and of every 
thing : birth, progress, rise, decline, fall, and death. 

Once the impossibility of a creation as 
regards space and time, by an Eternal Being 
anterior to time and superior to space, is admitted 
—once we admit, on the contrary, that matter 
can no more be created than it can be destroyed ; 
I that, therefore, the eternity of matter, as the il- 
lustrious author of the Cosmos believes, is incon- 
testable, and that the continual re-creation of 
matter is a consequence of its eternity, then we 
remember and understand the reply of Laplace, 
explaining his Mecanique Celeste to Napoleon. 
"But in your system/' said the Emperor, "what 
do you do with God? 5 ' "Ah, God \" replied the 
astronomer, "is a hypothesis of which I have no 
need." Laplace spoke thus of a personal God, 
who was said to have created and to govern the 
world. But under the great name of God we 
may, I think, be allowed to place a different idea, 
and one, at least, as lofty. 
Let us try. 

When Pascal enounced his well-known saying, 
" Truth on one side the Pyrenees is error on the 
other," he spoke of conventional truths, those 
which the ever-varying opinions of mankind 
make and destroy. Assuredly he would not have 



OF THE CREATION. 



23 



spoken thus of mathematical truths, he would 
have said with Newton — Natura est semper sibi 
consona. For he had said himself, — Nature always 
imitates herself. Pascal, who even then could 
measure and calculate the movements of the 
heavenly bodies in their unchanging course, knew 
full well that one and the same geometry prevails 
throughout the universe ; he was well aware that 
everywhere the diameter of a circle is the third of 
its circumference — that everywhere in a triangle 
the square of the hypothenuse equals the squares 
of the two other sides. If Pascal lived now-a- 
days, and if in examining the composition of one 
of the rays of the sun, he were to ascertain of what 
metals the body of the sun is composed, he would 
acknowledge that one and the same chemistry 
prevails throughout the universe, and then, re- 
modelling his celebrated dictum, he would say, 
"Truth in one star, in one world, is truth in all 
stars, and in all worlds." Then need he only 
carry his inexorable logic a little farther and 
say, " The same nature, the same morality, the 
same laws for all things, and for every being in 
every world." And then he might thus complete 
his idea, " God is the general result of all par- 
ticular laws ; He is the original and final law, the 
highest law, the law of laws." 



24 THE APOLOGY OF AN UNBELIEVER. 



III. — Of Providence. 

This is what the government of the world by 
God, its Creator, is called. 

Voltaire believed firmly in a Creator, " The 
work/' he incessantly repeats, " demonstrates the 
workman."* This argument is not, however, 
quite so convincing as he believed it. He admits 
the eternity of matter. Now, if the work like 
its maker be eternal, if it is its own maker, this 
argument disappears. It is then Spinoza, who is in 
the right, like Anaxagoras, Aristotle, Epicurus, 
Lucretius, Seneca, Abelard, Amaulri of Chartres, 
the great Chinese sect of Foe, and so many 
others. f Voltaire, it seems to me, should have 
been more careful; first, because the creation 
would have been a miracle, and he did not believe 
in them; next, because a watchmaker can only 

* " L'univers ru'embarrasse et je ne puis songer 
Que cette horloge existe, et n'ait point d'horloger." 

(Les Cabales.) 
t A lady who sought alms for a charity, having received 
from a man well known to be an Atheist, a handsome 
sum ; " What, Sir she exclaimed, " you are so generous, 
and yet you do not believe in a God. You know though 
that Voltaire himself said, 4 Si Dieu n'existait pas, il 

\faudrait Tinventer.' " " Oh, Madam," was the reply, " that 
is exactly what has been done." 



OF PKOVIDENCE. 



25 



make a watch when he has all the materials at 
hand, and is therefore its arranger and not its 
creator ; lastly, because in persistently denying 
God's Providence, he, by that very denial, put the 
Divine creation, as it were, out of court. For, 
how can one conceive that, after having created 
this world, God immediately abandoned it. 

. . . . en detourne sa face, 
Et d'un pied dedaigneux le lan cant dans Fespace, 
Eentre dans son repos ? 

According to this system God Eternal awoke 
iall of a sudden in the midst of His everlasting 
existence, made the world and its laws, and then 
went to sleep again for another eternity.* 

But when he denies God's Providence, Voltaire 
gives much more solid reasons. It is only neces- 
sary for him to establish the existence of evil. 
Evil exists; who can deny it? Physical and 
moral evil, under all possible forms. We behold 
the intemperance of the seasons, from the icy 

* The inconsequence of Voltaire's deism, as M. Andre* 
Lefevre, the clever imitator of Lucretius, has well shown, 
is in some measure recognised and allowed by Voltaire 
himself, in the boldest portion of his philosophical works, 
— the Dialogues of Lucretius and Posidonius, of Evhemerus 
and Callicrates ; between A. B. 0., etc. 



26 THE APOLOGY OF AN UNBELIEVER. 

cold of the poles to the burning heat of the 
tropics., volcanoes, earthquakes, floods, drought, 
famine ; we feel illnesses, wounds, pains, and 
broken affections, eternal separations ; we are the 
witnesses and the victims of injustice, of violence, 
of spoliation, of tyranny, of murder, and of fratri- 
cidal wars. Everywhere force and knavery 
triumph over right. History, full of atrocious 
crimes, but too often unpunished, and of frightful 
calamities, is but the chronicle of the woes of 
humanity. Misfortunes, which are undeserved, 
for we none of us ask for life, none of us chose 
our lot. We have endured them, we strive un- 
ceasingly against the ills of nature and society. 
How can we reconcile the existence of God with 
that of evil. If God exists, He is Almighty, and 
being Almighty, He is consequently all good. 
Thus He is defined, and thus He is represented to 
us. Why then does He allow evil to continue ? 
If He cannot destroy it, He is powerless; if He 
can, but will not do so, He is wicked, He is evil 
itself. 

This argument has always been and will always 
be without an answer."^ 

* This is the argument of Epicurus, as cited by Lactan- 
tius (JDq Ira Dei, cap. xiii.), who vainly tries to answer 



OF PROVIDENCE. 



27 



Men have known it in all times and in all 
countries, at least by instinct; for there is hardly 
any religion which, in order to justify itself, 
seeing the ills of this world, has not admitted two 
rival prin ciples, always enemies and in perpetual 
strife, — the principle of good and the principle of 
evil. They are the Orimasdes and Ahrimanes of 
the Persians, Brahma and Shiva of the Hindoos, 
Osiris and Typhon of the Egyptians, Tonaca- 
teuctli and Tescatlipoca of the Aztecs, Vita- 
ouentrou and Houakouvou of the Patagonians, 
Jehovah and Satan of the Jews, Allah and Shitan 
of the Arabs: so too, in fact, God and the Devil. 
But by this Manichssan creed the difficulty is 
only misplaced, not solved. We at once ask, ie Why 
does God not destroy the devil? If He wishes to, 
but has not the power, He is not Almighty; if 
he has the power but will not use it, He is not all- 
good. In one way or other He ceases to be God." 

it. " Either God wishes to destroy evil and cannot ; or 
He can do so but will not ; or neither wishes nor has the 
power to destroy it ; or He desires and is able to do so. 
If He wishes to destroy evil, but cannot do so, He is im- 
potent ; if He can, but will not do so, He is wicked ; if 
He neither desires nor has the power to destroy it, He is 
impotent as well as wicked ; if He can and will do so, how 
comes there to be any evil in the world V 



28 THE APOLOGY OP AN UNBELIEVER. 



Had we not better believe in the eternity of 
matter and in its auto -creation ? Had we not better 
say ; — It is not by a separate, distinct intelligence, 
which creates or permits evil, which can be angry, 
be appeased, lets itself be moved by prayer, can 
even break its own enactments by working mira- 
cles, that the world is governed; it is by great 
general laws like gravitation ; these laws are fatal, 
unchangeable, inexorable.* All things, man 
among the rest, are subject to their unavoidable 
empire. The life of all living beings is passed in 
striving against these laws, and man's in con- 
quering them, in making them his own, in 
making them his servants. He has made Nature, 
once his sovereign, his slave. This, in fact, is civili- 
sation ; for commerce, arts, letters themselves, and 
even language, are nothing but the victories of 
mind triumphing over conquered matter, f Man 
had long ago provided himself with fire, light, 
iron, corn, cattle, the shelter of houses and gar- 

* ISTos destins tenebreux vont par des lois immenses, 
Que rien ne deconcerte, et que rien n'attendrit. 

Victor Hugo. 

A truth already expressed in the old saying, — Ducunt 
volentem fata, nolentem trahunt ; and which Bossuet calls 
" La loi qui se suit toujours elle-meme." 

t I understand by mind, organised, living, thinking 
matter, as opposed to inorganic matter. 



OF PROVIDENCE. 



29 



ments: in our own time he has made steam his 
beast of burden and his steed by land and sea. 
He has made the sun take his portrait, and the 
lightning, swifter than light, flying along the 
telegraph wire, carries his messages and does his 
commissions.* 

I shall be told " to deny the creation and 
Providence, is to deny all religion. " Yes, un- 
doubtedly, all revealed religion. What are reli- 
gions? Moral legislations, and as such, worthy 
of all respect, and very necessary at the com- L 
mencement of society ; especially when they form 
themselves in order to supply new wants, born of 
new ideas, when they put aside the past in order 
to open up the future. But religions are only 
human institutions, and the most fervent Deist is 
unable to see the finger of his God in them. 
That which deprives them of all mark of a super- 
natural origin — not to mention their numerous 
imperfections — that which condemns them without 
appeal, is their plurality. " Each one saith that 
it is better than another, and is confident that it 
is the best and the truest, . . . they are, let men 
say what they will, upheld by human hands and 

* Statistics show that the power of the machines used 
for industrial purposes in England alone surpasses the 1 
united force of the entire human race. 



30 THE APOLOGY OF AN UNBELIEVER. 

means. . . The nation, the country, the place 
gives the religion. . . We are circumcised or 
baptised; we are Jews, Mahometans, Christians, 
before we know that we are men. If religion 
were fixed by a divine tie, nothing in the world 
could shake it in us. Such a tie could never be 
broken ; if there were in it a touch and spark of 
the Divinity, it would appear everywhere, and 
produce effects which would be miraculous." Thus 
wrote the Canon Pierre Charron (de la Sagesse, 
Book II. chap. 5), and what is more he dared to 
publish it in 1601 ; this, however, was in the 
reign of Henry IV., more tolerant, because more 
sceptical than his predecessors. 

I am well aware that men begin to make of 
the science of religion a science like all others, a 
science purely human : that men begin to trace 
clearly its descent, to recognise that each religion 
springs from another one ; * that, in fact, like 
the languages of Aryan extraction, like civilisa- 
tion itself, which flowed down from Central Asia 
to the basins of the Euphrates and the Kile and 
thence to Europe, they have a common starting 
point in the patriarchal beliefs of the primitive 



* "The gods that be sprung from those who exist no 
longer." — Kig Veda. 



OF PROVIDENCE. 



31 



Brahmins, in the hymns of the ancient Veda. But 
even if all the different religions are but suc- 
cessive sects of the one primeval faith, their 
plurality, still more their hostility, would be 
none the less evident, and the argument would 
lose none of its force. Not to mention the savage 
dogma which, in spite of St. Paul,"* dooms to 
everlasting damnation all who are, who have been, 
or who shall be outside the Catholic Church, be 
they Confucius, (yakia Mouni (Buddha), Socrates, 
Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Spinoza, Kant, Wash- 
ington, Lincoln. 

" Man's heart is thunderstruck at the idea/' 
says Fenelon, priest though he was. And the 
hard-hearted Calvin himself calls it " decretum 
horribile."] But how conceive that the common 
Father of men has given the truth to some, error 
to all the rest? That He has so highly blessed 



* " Each man shall be judged according to the law that 
he knew." 

t It was by this impious doctrine of grace, and that of 
predestination, that the social distinctions to which Europe 
was a prey, from the fall of the Roman Empire till the 
French Revolution, were maintained and justified. " On 
the divine feudalism was built up a secular and visible^ 
feudalism . . . a few of the elect in heaven, a few of the 
elect on earth." — Edg. Quinet. 



32 THE APOLOGY OF AN UNBELIEVER. 



those who live in some countries, so cruelly dis- 
inherited those who inhabit the rest of the globe? 
To accept the dogma of grace, that is to say, of 
arbitrary caprice, or to submit the justice of God 
to the chances of birth, to the degrees of latitude 
and longitude — is it not to do Him a cruel injury ? 
To all, I would say to the Deist, He has given 
conscience, which is the same, regard being had 
to the amount of enlightenment acquired by 
civilisation, in every place, and in every age. To 
all He would have giyen a religion, a good and 
true one, His own, in fact, if there were on the 
earth any other than conscience. All men would 
have received at their birth this gift, the most 
precious with which the Creator could endow 
them, and without which they could be neither 
equal nor alike, nor brothers.* 

Oh ! I might well say with Schiller, " Why 



* Let the moral laws of Menu, of Buddha, of Confucius, 
of Zoroaster, of Plato, of Zeno, of Epictetus, of Marcus 
Aurelius be examined; do we not find in them the same 
doctrines as in the religious laws of Moses, of Jesus, and 
of Mahomet 1 M. Ernest Havet has proved that all the pre- 
cepts that form what is called the Christian morality, were 

\ already to be found in the writings of the Greek philoso- 
phers : and M. Paul Janet, again, has shown that, with 
v the aid of the recent writings of Orientalists, we may dis- 



OF FROVIDENCE. 



33 



admit no religion?— by religion." It is through 
piety, yes, through piety, I say, that one refuses 
to attribute to God the government of the world, 
because, to attribute it to Him, would be to pro- 
claim the habitual victory of the genius of evil 
over the genius of good, and to say, like Paul to 
the Corinthians, " the devil is the god of this y /: 
world." Our conscience revolts at the idea of 



cover the same precepts in the teaching of Confucius, of 
Buddha, and of Menu, every one of them, with no excep- 
tion, even the command to love our enemies, and to return 
good for evil. We may then affirm with Buckle (vol. i. 
p. 164) that since the constitution of human society, 
morality has not made a step in advance. It is knowledge 
only which has advanced, which yet advances, and which 
always will advance. 

And he adds, "to assert that Christianity communi- 
cated to man moral truths previously unknown, argues on 
the part of the assertor either gross ignorance, or else 
wilful fraud." I. c, and see the numerous citations given 
by him in defence of this assertion. 

Macaulay says, " It is true that in those things which 
concern this life and this world, man constantly becomes 
wiser and wiser. But it is no less true that as respects a 
higher power and a future state, man, in the language of 
Goethe's scoffing fiend, 

' bleibt stets von gleichem Schlag 

Und ist so wunderlich als wie am ersten Tag.'" 
(Macaulay, Essay on Ranke's History of the Popes.) 

c 



34 THE APOLOGY OF AN UNBELIEVER. 



what happens by His will, or even by His per- 
mission only.* Is it God who is present at a 
battle, who takes part in it and directs the blows? 
Does He send a lance into one man's breast, a 
bullet through another's head ; is it God who 
mows down battalions with grapeshot, who amuses 
Himself, like Caesar in the Circus, with the sight of 
fury and madness, who is delighted with the 
chorus of groans and curses, and who relishes, like 
ambrosia, the smell of blood ? I read in the 
newspaper that an honest workman passed with 
his family near a frozen river on which some 
children were playing. The ice broke, and the 
imprudent little ones were plunged in the water. 
The brave labourer, moved by pity and truly 
human, advanced to the edge of the ice, stoops 
down, seizes first one, then another and another, 
and saves them all from death. But the ice gives 
way beneath his efforts, he perishes; his own 
children, who depended on his labour for their 
bread, were left orphans. Will you say it was 
God who committed this monstrous iniquity ? 
And am I not more pious that you when I 

* " Si cest par moi quails regnent de la sorte 

Je veux, mes enfants, que le diable m'emporte." 

Beranger, Le Bon Dieu. 



OF PROVIDENCE. 



35 



only accuse a blind unconscious physical law 
which equally brings good and evil to pass."* 

The theologians, I am aware, will seek a means 
of escape. " You knew not/' they will sav, " the 
state of the victim's soul ; this man was perhaps 
in a state of mortal sin/' etc. Very well; and 
his children pay for his sin. But the fifty-four 
women crushed to death not long ago in a Swiss 
church, the roof of which fell in from the weight 
of the snow, and the 2 3 700 persons burnt alive 
last year in a church in Chili, because the priests, 
flying with their relics and their fetishes, had shut 
the doors of the sacristy — will you affirm that 
they all equally deserved a frightful death, that 
they all equally deserved to be punished by the 
God whom they had come to adore? Once more, 
it is I who am pious, when, instead of accusing 

* " It were better," says Bacon, "to have no opinion of 
God at all, than such an opinion as is unworthy of Him. 
Plutarch saith well to that purpose. < Surely,' saith he, 
4 1 had rather a great deal men should say that there was 
no such man at all as Plutarch, than that they should say 
that there was one Plutarch who would eat his children 
as soon as they were born. 7 " — Bacon, Essays, Of Super- 
stition. Yet the Christians say that their God " so loved 
the world " that He caused His only Son to die a shame- 
ful death, and now through the aid of a continual miracle 
to be everlastingly eaten by the faithful ! 



36 THE APOLOGY OF AN UNBELIEVER. 



God, who ought to know everything, to foresee 
everything, to be all-powerful, I lament that a 
physical law works with so much blindness and 
crueltv. 

I know too that this time the spiritualists will 
unite with the theologians, that they will both 
cry in chorus, " Wait, justice will be done in 
another life." Alas, my friends, are you quite 
sure? Do you not once again take for a certainty 
what is but a fervent hope. No one has ever 
come back from that other life to announce that 
it would not fail us. It is, then, a pure supposition 
which you make "somnia non docentis sed optantis" 
(Cicero). I have a right to say to you in turn, 
" Wait, and you will recognise directly that your 
pure supposition may well be a pure illusion. 

Let us resume the subject. 

It is not yesterday that the belief in these 
necessary laws which rule the world — laws without 
justice, without mercy, without pity— spread itself 
among men."* It is as old as human tradition. The 
progress from polytheism to monotheism is thought 
to be immense. I do not feel quite so sure about 

* " Nature is deaf to the complaints and prayers of 
man ; she sends him back to himself without mercy." — 
Feuerbach. 



OF PROVIDENCE. 



37 



this progress. In the first place it is monotheism 
which has bred intolerance. Polytheistic re- 
ligions voluntarily admitted strange gods into 
their Pantheon, and were far from prescribing 
their followers. " Dignus Roma locus quo Deus 
omnis eat."* It was not as adorers of Christ, 
but as members of a secret society (hetseria) 



* " When the Romans were besieging Veii, one of them 
approached the national goddess and said to her, 'Wilt 
thou come to Rome, Juno"? (Visne Eomam ire, Juno 1) 
The strange goddess replied, 4 I am willing.' She was 
carried within the Roman Pale, and her people followed 
her there. This story a hundred times repeated is that 
of every Roman conquest." (Edg. Quinet, Le genie des 
Religions, Liv. vii .). 

" The tolerating spirit of idolaters/' says Hume, " both 
in ancient and modern times, is very obvious to any one 
who is the least conversant in the writings of historians 
and travellers. When the oracle of Delphi was asked 
what rites or worship was most acceptable to the gods ? 
4 Those legally established in each city,' replied the oracle 
(Xenophon Memorabilia, lvi.). Even priests in those ages 
could, it seems, allow salvation to those of a different com- 
munity. . . . The intolerance of almost all religions which 
have maintained the unity of God is as remarkable as the 
contrary principle among Polytheists." (Hume, the 
Natural History of Religion, sec. iv. See too Bishop 
Warburton, in The Divine Legation of Moses (Book II, 
section 6), On the "Universal Toleration of Antiquity ; and 
Gibbon, Decline and Fall (chap. xvi.). 



38 THE APOLOGY OF AN UNBELIEVER. 



hostile to the empire and to imperial institutions, 
that the early Christians were prosecuted before 
they became themselves the prosecutors. Modern 
science then seems to be bringing back men's 
minds from monotheism to polytheism. On this 
point I must explain myself. 

All these gods of India, of Egypt, of Assyria, 
of Greece, were never anything but the personifi- 
cation of natural forces— Primus in orbe Deos fecit 
timor (Petronius), and the diversity of effects, 
which made men believe in the plurality of 
causes, opened the way for a belief in the plura- 
lity of gods. Tot numina quot nominal Thus, 
leaving on one side the primitive faith of the 
Hindoo shepherds, and confining ourselves to the 
worship of ancient Hellas, to the gods of Homer 
and Phidias, — Zeus, the cloud-compeller, presided 
in the upper regions of the atmosphere, which 
was believed to be the dwelling-place of fiery 
meteors, the abode of thunder and lightning. 
His mate Here was dominant in the lower part, 



* "The common appellation of Dii,Dei, Divi, given to 
all the beings who are the objects of worship, comes from 
the Sanscrit root J)i% (to shine) and signifies neither 
more nor less than (the brilliant.) These words are 
always applied to the gods, who were so called when the 



OF PROVIDENCE. 



39 



whence fell the rain and fogs. Apollo gave the 
light of day, his sister that of night ; Ouranos 
was heaven, Gaia, the earth ; Poseidon, the ocean; 
Hestia, fire; Demeter, and Dionysos, the necessary 
aliments, etc. There in Ancient Greece, the oldest 
name for the gods, say the learned, was the same as 
that of the laws (Themis) ; and these different 
gods, even the highest in position and the chief 
of Olympus, were all subject to the unchangeable 
will of a superior and anterior deity, a hidden, 
blind, unconscious god, who was called Destiny 
i^Arrf) , and whose irrevocable decrees had preceded 
the origin of the world. This Fatum, from whom, 
when adopted by the Latins, its neuter name 
seems to take away all personality, is precisely 
the last link in the chain of laws, implacable 
indeed, but always regular even in their appa- 



Aryans arrived at their period of Star-worship. The 
stars being almost the only fetishes which continued to 
be adored, the wordDeus became the synonym of (mighty 
being,) and carried westward, it was applied by the 
Aryans to those beings which were the objects of a 
worship. It is thus that, whilst ideas modify and trans- 
form themselves, expressions subsist, and the word which 
signified a star, now serves to define an immaterial and 
unique being, the Creator of the universe" (De Montroui, 
Le Fetichisme), 



40 THE APOLOGY OF AN UNBELIEVER. 



rent irregularities, which govern inexorably the 
material existence of men and things — we might 
almost add, the actions of men, for that which 
is called their free-will is always subject to 
the laws which rule the universe, and them- 
selves in the universe. This is remarkably con- 
firmed by moral statistics (on crimes, suicide, 
marriage, etc.), when isolated facts are ac- 
counted for by the totality of general facts.* 
" Human freedom, which all men pride them- 
selves on," says Spinoza, with great truth, "is 
only the consciousness of their will joined to their 
ignorance of the causes which determine it."t 
In fact, if restraint is a necessity which we per- 
ceive, necessity is a check which we do not 
remark. Kant, also, recognises in numerous 



* If it has been proved, for instance, that the number of 
marriages is in a direct ratio with abundance or scarcity 
of food, it follows that in a country where food is abun- 
dant, the will of the two consenting parties is determined, 
without their suspecting it, by the ease with which they 
can support themselves. 

f M. Littre expresses the same idea in somewhat dif- 
ferent language. " Our will," he says, " is not a faculty 
which inclines of itself towards such and such motives ; 
on the contrary, it is this or that motive which inclines 
our will to take a certain resolution.'' 



OF PROVIDENCE. 



41 



passages, cited by Buckle (History of Civilisation, 
note A to chap, i., vol i.), the existence of a 
necessity destructive of liberty. " Rejecting, 
then," adds the illustrious and much to be re- 
gretted Buckle, who raises himself from man to 
history, "the metaphysical dogma of free-will, 
and the theological dogma of predestined events, 
we are driven to the conclusion that the actions 
of men, being determined solely by their ante- 
cedents, must have a character of uniformity, 
that is to say must, under precisely the same cir- 
cumstances, always issue in precisely the same 
events ... all the vicissitudes of the human 
race, their progress or their decay, their happi- 
ness or their misery must be the. fruit of a double 
action : an action of external phenomena on the 
mind, and another action of the mind on the 
phenomena " (Buckle, History of Civilisation, 
vol. i., p. 18, second edition, 8vo). 

Let us resume the subject. 

Genesis says, " God made man in his image." 
We might answer, " And so, too, conversely." 
It is plain enough in fact, that it was men 
who made the gods. Six centuries before Jesus 
Christ, the Greek philosopher Xenophanes corn- 
batted in the following terms the superstition 



42 THE APOLOGY OF AN UNBELIEVER. 



of his time. " Mortals fancy, that the gods 
have their form, their garments, their language. 
The Thracians adored a god with red hair : if 
oxen and lions had hands to shape images, they 
would design divine forms like to their own 
countenances." In the same manner Anaxa- 
goras said, "If the birds made themselves a 
god, he would have wings : the god of horses 
would have four legs." And 2,400 years 
later, Feuerbach explains in one short phrase 
what he understands by anthropomorphism. "A 
god [objective and] supernatural is nothing else 
than a supernatural Ego : the [subjective] being 
of man who has exceeded his bounds and raised 
himself above his [objective] being/' * Biichner 

* "He (man) affirms his dreams . . . beholding, the 
phenomena of the physical world, he felt certain im- 
pressions, which impressions, endowed by his imagination 
with a body, became his gods" (Ren an, Etudes oV Histoire 
Iteligieuse, p. 16). And Hume says, "By degrees the 
active imagination of man, uneasy in this abstract con- 
ception of objects, about which it is incessantly employed, 
begins to render them more particular, and to clothe them 
in shapes more suitable to its natural comprehension. 
It represents them to be sensible, intelligent beings, like 
mankind; actuated by love and hatred, and flexible by 
gifts and entreaties, by prayers and sacrifices. Hence the 
origin of religion" (Philosophical Works, vol. iv, p. 472). 



OF PROVIDENCE. 



43 



adds, M Think of the poetical heaven of the Greeks, 
peopled with ideal figures, with gods eternally 
young and beautiful, who live, enjoy themselves, 
fight just like men, and find the greatest charm 
of their existence in taking a personal part in 
human destinies ; think of the gloomy and iras- 
cible Jehovah of the Jews, who punishes to the 
third and fourth generation ; of the heaven of the 
Christians, where God shares his omnipotence 
with his Son, where the blessed are arranged in 
a hierarchy, in accordance with our earthly ideas : 
of the heaven of the Catholics, where the Virgin 
intercedes with the Saviour for the guilty with 
womanly tenderness and eloquence : of the 
heaven of the Orientals, which promises to be- 
lievers numberless Houris of undecaying beauty : 
of the heaven of the Greenlander, where happi- 
ness consists in a large supply of blubber : of the 
happy hunting-fields of the wild Indians, where a 
never-failing supply of game rewards the blessed : 
of the heaven of the old Germans, who drink in 
Valhalla, mead from the skulls of their conquered 
foes, etc. Everywhere human weaknesses, human 
passions, a longing for human enjoyment." 

" The religious problem/' says M. Emile Burnouf 
(Revue des Deux Mondes, No. for 15th April, 



44 THE APOLOGY OF AN UNBELIEVER. 



1868), "presents this alternative, — either religions 
are the immediate and voluntary work of a hidden 
power which makes a present of them to man at 
certain moments of his history ... or else they 
are the spontaneous production of the ordinary 
forces of nature whose actions, being spread over 
long periods, manifest themselves in successive 
phases. In the first case, there would be no 
valid reason for attacking any particular religion 
. . . the intolerance of religions for one another 
thus becomes reprehensible from every point of 
view. In the other case, these sudden acts of an 
invisible power disappear : God ceases continually 
to renew and repair His works. . . . Instead of 
being the workman, He becomes the model : the 
real workman is man; he who builds temples, 
raises altars, offers sacrifices, prays, ... is the 
interpreter of religious thought, the prophet who 
announces it. Thus under the hypothesis we are 
considering, and which is that of science, re- 
ligions are guided in their course by natural laws. 
As a living being springs from an invisible germ, 
increases in the womb, and when at liberty arrives 
at its greatest vigour, sees in time its vital power 
decrease, and at length returns to the elements 
from which it came : so a new religion is born in 



OF PROVIDENCE. 



45 



the bosom of a people without their perceiving it ; 
it is at first a secret society, a mystery : very soon 
it becomes powerful, gains sway over new minds, 
becomes all powerful, afterwards it diminishes and 
sees the place it once held invaded little by little 
by a new idea, in which it is at length absorbed." 
{La Science des Religions.) 

At the birth of every successive faith the same 
thing happens, under some shape or other, as 
took place in the first councils of Christianity, at 
which the foundations of the new religion were 
laid. The new dogmas, even the most abstract 
ones, are put to the vote of the Fathers and 
Doctors. Placetne hoc omnibus ? Placet. And 
through the help of this formula a charter is drawn 
up. One sees plainly enough, that in all times 
and in all countries men, like the bards in the 
Vedic Hymns, may proclaim themselves authors 
of the Gods.* 



* Religions have now so completely lost their import- 
ance that we see them sacrificed every day for motives of 
interest or even of convenience. Who can name a princess, 
Catholic or Protestant, who would refuse to enter the 
Greek church, in order to become a Eussian Grand- 
Duchess ? Again, in the case of marriages between per- 
sons of different faiths, it is on consideration of mere 



46 THE APOLOGY OF AN UNBELIEVER. 



Let us, then, never seek in heaven — a word 
devoid of meaning — the explanation of what comes 
to pass on earth. But it will be said, to avow our 
profound ignorance of all the great problems of 
general life and particular destiny, problems 
which man endeavours perhaps in vain to fathom 
and to resolve, is to avow that we live in an in- 
ferior, imperfect, incomplete world, where man 
can no more satisfy his aspirations, the aspirations 
of a legitimate curiosity, than his dreams of last- 
ing happiness in ideal perfection. Alas ! who 
doubts it ? Were it necessary indeed to prove 
that the world were imperfect, would it not be 
enough to point to the face of the earth, one 
vast .field of carnage, where conservation takes 
place by destruction, where life is only supported 
by death, and only nourished by life."^ Bellum 



expediency that parents, without the right to do so, 
determine the religion of their children. And since the 
world is so completely indifferent as to whether we pro- 
fess one religion or another, why does it not show itself 
equally indifferent as to whether we profess any at all ? 

* " Physiology writes over the portals of life, ' Debemur 
morti nos nostraquef with a profound er meaning than the 
Eoman poet attached to that melancholy line. Under 
whatever disguise it takes refuge, whether fungus or oak, 
worm or man, the living protoplasm not only ultimately 



OF PROVIDENCE. 



47 



omnium contra omnes. The herring devours the 
smaller molluscs, and a shark devours a shoal of 
herrings : the partridge eats insects, and the 
hawk eats the partridge. Man devours all crea- 
tion, and man kills man* Only reckon up the 
victims of murderous superstition; or the hecatombs 
of the human herd which in their sojourn on earth 
the great Pontiffs of the God Sabaoth — those 
mighty butchers who are called conquerors — 
Cambyses, Attila, Gengis Khan, Napoleon, 
have slaughtered. Well might one say with 
wild De Maistre, u the earth continually fed with 
blood is but one huge altar, on which all that 



dies, and is resolved into its mineral and lifeless con- 
stituents, but is always dying ; and, strange as the paradox 
may sound, could not live unless it died" (Huxley, in Fort- 
nightly Revieiv, February, 1869). 

* " By dint of a close study and observation of nature, 
the philosopher has come to the conclusion that destruc- 
tion is the perpetual law and condition of life, of its in- 
crease and progress ; some are continually sacrificed for 
others, and without it the others could not flourish ; so 
life ranges itself and builds itself up on death, on great 
layers of hecatombs ; the weak is the prey of the strong, 
and this necessity is found everywhere, in history as well 
as in nature. We hide it as much as possible, but look 
closely, and it may always be discovered " (Sainte-Beuve 
Nouveaux Licndis,ix. p. 101). 



48 THE APOLOGY OF AN UNBELIEVER. 



lives must be unceasingly sacrificed until the 
consummation of all things, the extinction of 
evil, the death of death." 

If it were necessary to prove yet further that 
this world is incomplete, one could do so no less 
easily by a fact, without and, as it were, in a 
single word. Not only have we but one mouth to 
breathe, talk, sing, eat, drink, spit, vomit with ; 
but what is yet stranger, and yet more incompre- 
hensible, all the great animals of the earth's 
creation, man among the number, have but one 
and the same organ for the vilest and the noblest 
functions of animal life ; generation and the 
excretions. 

Well, then, it will be said, why we are in this 
inferior, imperfect, incomplete world, while the 
imagination of each of us has dreamt of a better 
one, has built up another less barbarous and less 
defective, worthier superior creatures, and their 
vast ambition. 

Why? 

Tes pourquoi, dit le Dieu, ne finiront jamais. 

We might just as well ask why does the earth 
revolve round the sun, and the sun turn on its 
axis. Why am I myself, why are you, you; why, 



OF PROVIDENCE. 



as D'Alembert's Indian Prince asks, is there 
any one and any thing. Childish questions if 
you like; "questions of men born blind asking 
what is light," but which, remaining without hope 
of an answer, frighten the mind and reason. We 
should never ask " Why "? We should only ask 
u How"? To this form only of the question can 
human knowledge give an answer. 



D 



50 THE APOLOGY OF AN UNBELIEVER. 



IV. — Of the Soul. 

Admitting the workman of the work — God the 
watch-maker, as Goethe mockingly called Him — 
but rejecting Providence, the old fortune-teller 
(anus fatidica), as Epicurus called it, Voltaire 
rejects the soul too, regarded as an immaterial 
substance distinct from the body, and which had 
preceded and would survive its temporary abode. 
Pie only saw it in the body itself, as indeed he 
might have seen God in the world, the universal 
soul of the universal body. " If one admits," he 
says in effect, et that God could give to a certain 
portion of living matter arranged in a certain way, 
and which we call the eye or the ear, the gift of 
sight or of hearing, why not admit that He could 
give to another part of the organism called the 
brain, the gift of thought?" Here he is invin- 
cible, and so, too, when he adds, " If the soul 
were a separate being, thought would not only be 
its mode of action, but its essence; it would 
always be thinking, which is far from being the 
case. During deep sleep, lethargy, a fit, does 
^ man think?" Again, he is irrefutable when he 
says to this effect, 44 All these immaterial and 
immortal souls, given to the innumerable gene- 



OF THE SOUL. 



51 



rations of men since the creation," (he should 
have said " to all the animated beings which 
people all worlds throughout space and time/') 
" whence come they ? " From what inexhaustible 
treasure house does God take them? And into 
what other universe beyond space and time will 
He make them pass after this life's short pilgrim- 
age? And when did all these souls, come we 
know not whence, and bound we know not whither, 
join those bodies which they are destined to ani- 
mate and to govern?*' Was it at the very moment 
of conception, of procreation? If so, then, as 
Voltaire says, with his sensible laugh, " God 
would be on the watch at every assignation," in 
all worlds, and at every moment of eternity, in 
order to send forth a soul seed and a body seed. 
And I dare not repeat, as coarsely as he does, in 
what an infamous neighbourhood the soul would 
be lodged during the nine months of pregnancy. 
— Is it at the moment of birth ? But the child 
had already embryonic life; he might have died, 
having already existed in his mother's womb. 



* " Ignoratur enim quee sit natura animai ; 

Nata sit, an, contra nascentibus insinuetur." 

Lucretius. 



52 THE APOLOGY OF AN UNBELIEVER. 



The soul which he received, with the respiratory 
life, is respiration, is breath, the breath of life 
which God, according to Genesis, breathed into 
the face of every man. It is the irvevjia of the 
Greeks, which becomes ^v^V sensation, then vovs 
intelligence ; the spiritus of the Romans, which 
becomes anima and mens. Is it true then that the 
soul entered along w^ith the first breath of air? 
When and at what moment? 

And if man has a soul, why should not monkeys, 
dogs, elephants, parrots, and so, step by step, all 
the other animals, down to the oyster and the 
coral insect, have one too ? Montaigne and La 
Fontaine say Yes, if Descartes says No. In fact, 
they have ideas, and combinations of ideas, just 
as well as men. And their soul, would it be 
immortal like our own, as our friend * * * 
would have it, or at least would have us allow to 
be possible?* But what remuneration will they 
receive for their acts done in this life ? In spite 
of all Genesis says about the covenant God made 

* " Most of the arguments of philosophers in favour of 
the immortality of man, apply equally to the permanence 
of this principle [an immaterial one] in other living 
beings." (Agassiz ; Contributions to the Natural History 
of the United States, vol. i. p. 60-64.) 



OF THE SOUL. 



53 



with animals, they have no knowledge of good 
and evil, no sense of what is just and unjust. 
They have no sort of free-will; they follow their 
natural inclinations as a river flows in its channel, 
and on that account they deserve neither reward 
nor punishment. And why not extend the gift 
of a soul to the vegetable world? Plants, too, 
have life, respiration, and the union of the sexes. 
One soon becomes involved in inextricable diffi- 
culties, in mazes without end, and in ridiculous 
contradictions.* 

On the contrary, the belief that the brain is 



* "An incorporeal being which moves a body, an in 
tangible being which touches my organs, a simple being 
which increases with age, an incorruptible being which 
perishes by degrees !" — (Letters of Memmius to Cicero.) 

" If the soul/' says D'Holbach," makes my arm to move 
when nothing opposes it, nevertheless, it cannot make my 
arm raise a weight which is too heavy for it. Behold, 
then, a mass of matter which annuls the impulse given 
by a spiritual cause, which, having no connection with 
matter, ought to have no more difficulty in moving the 
world, than in moving an atom." 

For an account of the various opinions which have pre- 
vailed on the seat and origin of the soul, see Montaigne 
(Book II. chap. 12) who adds, "He who would make a 
collection of the blunders of human wisdom would have 
wonders to tell us." 1 



54 THE APOLOGY OF AN UNBELIEVER. 



the seat and organ of thought, as the eye is of 
sight, the ear of hearing, the nerves of feeling, the 
stomach of digestion, the lungs of breathing, the 
heart of circulation, — this belief, I say, explains 
and resolves all problems with perfect ease and 
clearness. We can easily perceive that thought 
has its origin in the brain, like sight in the eye, 
hearing in the ear. We feel that the labour of 
thought fatigues the brain, just as the labour of 
walking tires the muscles of the legs. It is in 
the brain that our different organs and the nervous 
system have their centre, in order that they may 
transmit to it impressions from without, otherwise, 
deprived as it is of innate ideas,* it would have no 
ideas whatever; it .is the brain, the seat of the 
will as of the understanding, which, by means of 
the seven pairs of nerves, that cross each other 
in our neck, sends its orders to the members, its 
servants. The brain in our organism would have 
no function, no sense, would be, as has been well 
said, " un etre de raison sans raison d'etre if it 
did not produce thought. Our intelligence is born 

* Nihil est in intellectu quod non fuerit in sensu-. 
Locke and Condillac have victoriously demonstrated this 
aphorism. Now, if all our ideas come from the senses, 
how can ideas survive the senses ? 



OF THE SOUL. 55 

with it, is developed with it, changes with it, and 
with it is destroyed.* 



* . . . . Gigni pariter cum corpore, et una 
Crescere sentimus, pariterque senescere mentem. 

Lucretius. 

" The weakness of the body, and that of the mind in 
infancy, are exactly proportioned ; their vigour in man- 
hood, their sympathetic disorder in sickness, their common 
gradual decay in old age. The step further seems un- 
avoidable, their common dissolution in death." — (Hume, 
Essay on the Immortality of the Soul.) 

This, it seems to me, is demonstrated by the experi- 
ments of physiology, a new science, yet in its youth, but 
which already begins to unveil the mysteries of psycho- 
logy, and boldly announces its claim to dethrone and take 
this latter's place. (See the works of Magendie, Flourens, 
Bain, and the illustrious Helmholtz : and recently, in 
France, the writings of Berthelot, Robin, Broca, Vulpian, 
See, Luys, etc., etc.; and in England, in a still newer but 
scarcely less important science, that of anthropology, the 
works of Sir J. Lubbock, of Sir C. Lyell, of Huxley ? 
Wallace, etc) 

I shall peimit myself but one short quotation on this 
subject. " L is oxygen which is always both the exciter 
of physico-clLemical phenomena and the condition of the 
functional acivity of organized matter, . . . when we in- 
ject oxygenis^d blood (arterial) into muscular tissue, or 
into nervous, glandular, or cerebral ditto, whose vital pro- 
perties are extinct, ... we see, under the influence of 
this oxygenized fluid, each tissue resume its peculiar 
vital properties. The muscles regain their contractibility, 



56 THE APOLOGY OF AN UNBELIEVER. 



If it should be asked, " How can matter have 
the gift of thought " ? I would ask in turn, " How 
has it the gift of life ? And it would be as hard 
for my querist to answer me as for me to reply to 
his question. Nevertheless, matter lives, there- 
fore it can think.*' 

Brain- thought, once it be admitted, imme- 
diately explains by its successive enlargement 
what is justly called the scale of beings. Com- 
parative anatomy shows that if intelligence in- 
creases step by step, from the oyster to man, it is 
always in a direct ratio with the development of 
cerebral matter. The essential characteristic 



the power of movement and sensibility retuijns to the 
nerves, and the cerebral faculties re-appear in the brain. 
For instance, when we inject oxygenised blood into the 
decapitated head of a dog, by means of the carotid artery, 
we see come back, little by little, not only thk vital pro- 
perties of the muscles, the glands, and the neijves, but we 
perceive those of the brain also return in lij^e measure, 
the head regains its sensibility, the glands secfete, and the 
animal executes movements which appear to be directed 
by volition." — (Claude Bernard, Le Proble^e de la Phy- 
siologie.) 

* "Mind is a property of nervous matter, ^s gravitation 
is of every material particle, we know each met by expe- 



OF THE SOUL. 



57 



which distinguishes the human race from the 
highest species of the other vertebrates, is not the 
teeth or the thumb of the bi-mane — as Cuvier 
and Helvetius would have it — but the volume of 
his brain lobes, which is always, says Carl Vogt, 
in a direct ratio with the extent of his intelligence. 
Is it not a natural malformation of the brain 
which produces idiots — those half - developed 
men? Again, do not the physiologists agree that 
if the human brain does not weigh 1,049 grammes 
in a man, and 907 in a v/oman, idiocy is inevitable ? * 
Why is the mean weight of the brain 1,450 grammes 
among white men, 1,228 among the Aborigines 
of Australia ; and may it not sink as low as 500 
grammes with the microcephale, as with the great 
man-like apes, the gorillas, the ourang-outangs, and 
the chimpanzees ? Why, too, do the physiologists 
allow that the posterior part of the brain, which 
governs the instinctive movements, is common to 
men and animals, whereas the anterior or frontal 
part, the home of the intellect, belongs to man 
alone ? And why have they marked out in the 
structure and volume of this anterior part the 
distinctive characteristics of the various races of 
the human family ? 

And let those who would deny the unity of 



58 THE APOLOGY OF AN UNBELIEVER. 



living beings, and make man double, apply to 

themselves these lines — 

" Instinct and reason, how can we divide 1 
Tis the fool's ignorance and pedant's pride." 

Prior.* 

How can they distinguish the instincts which 
they call animal, and which they say spring from 
the body, such as the instinct of preservation, 
which often causes selfishness and cruelty ; or 
that of reproduction, which excites the amorous 
passions and produces family affection, from the 
sentiments and thoughts, which they say come 
from the soul, although suggested by those in- 
stincts of which they are simply the consequents ? 
Where shall we place the boundary line? I defy 
them to trace and to define it. I defy them to 
separate clearly that which they would grant to 
the immortal soul, and that which they would 
grant to animal ity. 

* Imitated by Voltaire (Dictionnaire Philosophique, 
UAme!) 

" Avez-vous mesur6 cette mince cloison 
Que semble separer l'instinct de la raison." 
" Professor Agassi z . . . confesses that he cannot say 
in what the mental faculties of a child differ from those 
of a young chimpanzee." See the whole passage cited by 
Lyell, The Antiquity of Man, p. 493. 



OF THE SOUL. 



59 



Again, it is the belief that thought is the pro- 
duct of the brain, which alone explains local and 
temporary aberrations, or those general and lasting 
ones which reason undergoes. What strange and 
terrible effects are produced, for instance, by 
partial apoplexy, by certain illnesses, such as 
madness.* The man of the most powerful genius, 
who takes a large draught of strong wine at once, 
feels his sensorium commune upset, until digestion 
has taken place, and the balance is re-established. 
A violent fever gives him delirium, and if a drop 
of blood forces itself into the vessels of the brain, 
behold he loses his memory, or his will, or his 
reasoning powers, or all his mental faculties. He 
at once falls below the level of the brutes. I beg, 
with the greatest confidence, my opponents to 
answer honestly — who can look on a madman and 
believe firmly in an immaterial immortal soul, 
separate from, pre-existent to, and destined to 
survive the body.f And now, if we be asked, 



* " The saliva of a wretched mastiff touching the hand 
of Socrates, might disturb and destroy his intellect." 

Montaigne. 

f Pinel has classed madness simply among the other 
derangements of our organs. It has been said of him I 
" that he raised the deranged to the dignity of patients." t 



60 THE APOLOGY OF AN UNBELIEVER. 



" there is then for us no immortal life, no remu- 
neration according to our works as the established 
creeds teach " ? Must we say with Diderot, " I 
have not the hope of being immortal, because the 
desire of it has not given me that vanity" ? Or, 
again, must we admit that the souls of our earth 
pass from planet to planet according to the 
poetical fancy of Jean Raynaud and Sir David 
Brewster? Or shall we believe that they pass on 
from man to man in humanity itself, and that 
these transmigrations explain its progress, as we 
are taught to believe by the system of Pierre 
Leroux? Or should we adopt the ideas of Saint 
Simon, of Fourier, of Owen, etc.? And which of 
them shall we adopt? To all these queries I 
know no other reply than the motto of Montaigne 
" Que scay-je? " or Byron's line, 

" All that we know is nothing can be known." 
Unless we add the reflection of D'Alembert ; 



And Esquirol says, expressly, "Mental alienation, which 
ancient nations regarded as an inspiration or a chastise- 
ment of the gods, and which afterwards was looked on as 
demoniacal possession, and again, in later times, was 
thought to be caused by magic — mental alienation, I say, 
in ail its kinds and its innumerable varieties, differs in 
nothing from other maladies." 



ON THE SOUL. 



61 



" Since we know nothing about it, no doubt it is 
no concern of ours to know any more." The only 
valid reason to my mind, the only plausible, and 
at all events very specious one which can be given 
in favour of a future life, — admitting always the 
necessity that justice should be done, — is that we 
have the hope of living after death, and that^ 
second life can alone clear up our doubts and 
deliver to us the secret of universal destiny ; that 
this hope of another life, which will tell us all 
things, is, as it were, a promise, which the Author 
of all things — or the order of all things — seems to 
have made to us in giving us life here below.* 



* Is it not a simple form of habit, and the attachment 
which springs from it, to ideas just as well as to persons 
and things ? In this case sentiment, however respectable, 
would be nothing but a prejudice, and, as such, subject to 
illusions. Our senses aver that the sun turns about the 
earth ; it is reason, aided by science, which tells us that 
the earth turns about the sun. Even a Protestant clergy- 
man allows as much : — 

" The universal voice of mankind is not infallible. It 
was the universal belief ooce, on the evidence of the 
senses, that the earth was stationary; — the universal 
voice was wrong. The universal voice might be wrong in 
the matter of a resurrection." — Rev. W. F. Robertson's 
(late of Brighton) Sermons. 

"That which is called instinct, and which seems to 



62 THE APOLOGY OF AN UNBELIEVER. 



But this would be nothing else than to apply 
the argument of Anselm of Canterbury, repro- 
duced by Descartes, on the existence of God, to 
the immortal soul. " Since nothing can come 
from nothing," said they, " since every effect has 
a cause, it follows that the idea of God must have 
an origin, now this origin is nothing else than 
the existence of God, and this is the only proof 
which we can ever have." But are we then to 
conclude, because certain peoples have no idea of 
a Deity, that there is no God ? And from what 
notion of Him are we to draw the conclusion 
that He exists, and to determine what He is? 
Shall it be from the abject idea which the Negro 
has of his fetish, or from the sublime conception 
which Plato and Malebranche formed of the great 

others of incontestable value, does not deceive my philo- 
sopher ; and he applies to it his analysis ; he discovers 
its principle and its mode of action ; he accounts for it 
according to the laws of moral optics. He knows that the 
human heart is a labyrinth so made, and with an echo so 
well arranged that one and the same voice can both ask 
and reply. He therefore considers these answers as the 
simple reflections of desires, the repercussions and reflec- 
tions of the same thing, which prove nothing more than 
the internal forge where they originated, and which may 
well be barren like so many other desires (Sainte-Beuve, 
Nouveaux Lundis, vol. ix. p. 104). 



OF THE SOUL. 



63 



geometer ? It seems to me that this celebrated 
argument is beside the question, both as regards 
God and the soul. It is that form of reasoning 
which is called in the schools an enthymeme or 
imperfect syllogism. I therefore conclude that 
strict logic, putting aside sentiment, accepts but 
with great difficulty the belief in a future life. I 
find that all the premises hitherto stated would 
rather lead us to a contrary conclusion.* We 



* " May not the race of man sink like the generations 
of the mayfly ? Why cannot the Creator, so lavish in His 
resources, afford to annihilate souls as He annihilates 
insects ? Would it not almost enhance His glory to 
believe it ? That, brethren, is the question ; and Nature 
has no reply. The fearful secret of sixty centuries has ^/ 
not yet found a voice. The whole evidence lies before 
us. We know what the greatest and wisest have had to 
say in favour of an immortality ; and we know how, after 
eagerly devouring all their arguments, our hearts have 
sunk back in cold disappointment, and to every proof as 
we read, our lips have replied mournfully, that will not 
stand. Search through tradition, history, the world 
within you, and the world without, — except in Christ 
there is not the shadow of a shade of proof that man 
survives the grave." (Rev. F. W. Robertson's Sermon on 
" The Doubt of Thomas.") 

Descartes, too, says, " I confess that by natural reason 
alone we can make many conjectures about the soul, and 
have flattering conjectures, but no sort of certainty." 



64 THE APOLOGY OF AN UNBELIEVER. 



must probably be content to say with the tragic 
Seneca, and all the Stoics of antiquity,* What shall 



* Post mortem nihil est, ipsaque mors nihil . . . 
Quseris quo jaceas post obitum loco ? 
Quo non nata jacent ? Troades, Act III. 

" Our insensibility before the composition of the body 
seems to natural reason a proof of a like state after dis- 
solution ; were our horror of annihilation an original 
passion, not the effect of our general love of happiness, it 
would rather prove the mortality of the soul ; for, as 
nature does nothing in vain, she would never give us 
a horror against an impossible event. She may give us 
a horror against an unavoidable event, provided our en- 
deavours, as in the present case, may often remove it to 
some distance. Death is in the end unavoidable, yet "the 
human species would not be preserved had not nature 
inspired us with an aversion towards it." — (Hume, Essay 
on the Immortality of the Soul.) 

See., too, Pliny, {Natural History, Book vii., chap. 56.) 

« Let us ingenuously confess," says Montaigne, u that 
God alone has dictated it [immortality] to us and faith ; 
for 'tis no lesson of nature, and our own reason. And 
whoever will enquire into his own being and power, both 
within and without, without this divine privilege ; who- 
ever shall consider man impartially and without flattery, 
will see in him no efficacy or faculty that relishes of any- 
thing but death and earth" (Apology for Raymond de 
Sebonde). 

Buchner justly remarks that it would be more reason- 
able to give the name of immortal to the body and that 
of mortal to the soul ; for the body, if it perishes in its 



OF THE SOUL. 



65 



we be after death ? What we were before our 
birth." Or with Shakespeare and the wisest of 
the moderns — 

" We are such stuff 
As dreams are made of, and our little life 
Is rounded with a sleep." 

individual form, remains eternal as to the elements which 
compose it, and which cannot be annihilated ; whilst the 
soul or thought disappears, like life, along with the com- 
bination of elements which had produced it. " I know a 
man," said Voltaire, " who is firmly persuaded, that at the 
death of a bee, its buzzing ceases " (Letter to Mdme. Du 
Deffant). 



E 



66 THE APOLOGY OF AN UNBELIEVER. 



V. — Conclusion. 

What matters it after all ? For the innumer- 
able disciples of Buddha, the highest degree of 
happiness consists in annihilation. Each one of 
them repeats the last words of the Giaour, " I 
need not paradise, but rest."* At all events let 
us not go to Asia but keep to our own Europe. 
Is the belief in another life indispensable to the 
safety of human society? Montesquieu himself, 
like Bacon before him, is compelled to admit the 



* Quur non, ut plenus vitse con viva, recedis, 
iEquo animoque capis securam stulte, quietem 1 

Lucretius. 

" We may behold" (in the Introduction to the History 
of Buddhism, by E. Burnouf) " the wisest men, the noblest 
moralists, the most generous martyrs, all of them per- 
suaded that existence, even spiritual existence, is an evil, a 
chastisement, continually renewed by our faults ; we see 
them all longing for annihilation, and certain that they 
would attain it by the practice of virtue. It is the fear 
of being born again and of continuing, it is the horror of 
immortality under all its forms, even among the gods, 
which urges them to abnegation, to heroism, to unheard- 
of efforts of patience and courage, with the sole hope of 
escaping the movement of the world and the wearisome 
weight of life." (Prevost Paradol, Essais de Litter ature 
et de Politique, 3rd series, p. 343, 8vo.). 



CONCLUSION. 



67 



contrary.* Did the austere and virtuous repub- 
licans of ancient Rome, the followers of Zeno and 



* " The religion of Confucius denies the immortality of 
the soul, and the sect of Zeno did not believe in it. And 
yet, though no one would have expected it, these two sects 
have drawn from their bad principles, consequences, not 
indeed the just ones, but those which are excellent for 
society." " Born for society, the Stoics all believed it was 
their destiny to work for its advancement, and so much 
the more because all their reward lay with themselves, 
only happy through their philosophy, it seemed to them 
that nothing but others' happiness could augment their 
own" (Esprit des Lois, Book xxiv., chaps. 19 and 10). 

Montesquieu, when thus speaking, had nevertheless 
been energetically opposing what he calls the paradoxes 
of Bayle, viz., " That it is better to be an atheist than an 
idolater." Or in other terms, " That it is less dangerous 
to have no religion at all, than to have a bad one," and 
that " Real Christians could not form a state that would 
endure." 

Bacon however would have been on the side of Bayle, if 
we may judge from the following passage : — 

"Atheism leaves a man to sense, to philosophy, to 
natural piety, to laws, to reputation ; all which may be 
guides to an outward moral virtue though religion were 
not but superstition dismounts all these, and erecteth 
an absolute monarchy in the minds of men. Therefore, 
atheism did never perturb states ; for it maketh men wary 
of themselves, as looking no farther ; and we see the times 
inclined to atheism, as those of Csesar Augustus, were 
civil times" (Bacon, Essays, Of Atheism). 



68 THE APOLOGY OF AN UNBELIEVER. 



of Epicurus, expect a life to come? No more 
than did the patriarchs and prophets of the Old 
Testament, who never mention it, nor even heard 
of it.* Has man, in short, less merit in avoiding 



* There is no one now but is aware that the laws of 
Moses— like those of Menu long before — only established 
material rewards and punishments, immediate, and limited 
to the course of this life : " If you obey, you shall have 
rain in the spring and autumn, corn, and wine, and oil, 
and fodder for your cattle . . . but if you do not keep all 
the commandments, ye shall be accursed in the town and 
your fields . . . you shall suffer famine, you shall die of 
wretchedness, of cold, and of fever ; you shall have scurf, 
the itch, fistula, and ulcers in your legs j you shall eat 
the fruit of your belly, the flesh of your sons and your 
daughters" (Deuteronomy). So then the people of God, 
the revealers of monotheism, knew not the immortality of 
the soul ; they only received the first notions of this 
belief during the captivity at Babylon, and took it as a 
dogma from the Greek Platonists." 

As there are still some persons so ignorant, — for it can 
only be attributed to ignorance, as to maintain in England 
that the Jews held the dogma of the immortality of the 
soul before the captivity, I subjoin some extracts from 
English divines, whose authority few will dispute. 

" The hypothesis of Bishop Warburton concerning this 
remarkable fact, which, as far as the law of Moses is un- 
questionable, made few disciples." (Dean Milman, note in 
his edition of Gibbon, vol. ii., p. 296.) 

" How strong an internal evidence of the truth of what 



CONCLUSION. 



69 



evil and in choosing good, if he makes his choice, 
as Fenelon wished that men should love God, 
without fear of punishment and without hope of 
reward? Along with the belief in God's pro- 
vidence, for which there is neither present, nor 
past, nor future, but which regards only the 
present, all free-will ceases. How can man be 
master of and responsible for his actions when 
everything is foreseen, regulated, and ordained 
beforehand? How could his will, comparable to 
that of an ant, oppose itself to that of the Lord of 
the Universe, to the power of the Almighty? 
Through faith in God's Providence ; that is to 
say, in the dogma of predestination, one falls, on 
the one hand into Eastern fatalism, for that which 
must happen, happens, and on the other, into belief 



Moses wrote is furnished by the fact that he thus repre- 
sented the sanction of his law as consisting of temporal 
rewards and punishments only " (Archbishop Whately, 
Dissertation in the Encyclopaedia Britannica). So then, 
because Moses, either knew not, or else fraudulently con 
cealed, the truth which it most concerns mankind to know, 
we are required to believe in the truth of his mission. 
How little it serves to have written a book on logic ! See 
too Renan, Etudes d'Histoire Religieuse, p. 126. Gibbon, 
chap. xv. Buchner, Kraft und Stoff, p. 213. Bishop 
Warburton, the Divine Legation of Moses, passim. 



70 THE APOLOGY OF AN UNBELIEVER. 



in our impunity from punishment ; for when our 
responsibility ceases, so likewise do our faults and 
our merits. A criminal, a parricide, might appeal 
to the doctrine of St. Augustine of St. Thomas, of 
Calvin, and of "Bossuet, and claim to be absolved. 
He need only say " Since we are all only instru- 
ments in the hands of Providence, I could not 
help killing my father, this murder being decreed 
by Providence, whose instrument I am." If God's 
Providence exists then, must we say with Fenelon 
" Man stirs himself, God leads him." No, I pro- 
test, it is not God who compels me, it is my 
liberty, it is my conscience. Let us not forget 
that even when reduced to a choice of motives 
amongst those which rule our will, free-will still 
suffices as a basis for human responsibility, and 
consequently, for morality. In the moral world, 
too, God is a hypothesis, of which I have no 
need. My conscience has told me in firm, clear, 
and imperative tones, under pain of remorse (the 
real hell), if I disobey, — that the good is order ; 
that it is the same as utility for each and all of 
us ; that good is the moral law, as gravitation is a 
physical law, that our actions should tend to it, 
as a stone falling from our hands, tends to the 
centre of the earth. That good is the law of all 



CONCLUSION. 



71 



beings among themselves, especially of sentient 
beings, who are alike, who are brothers. 

" If it were necessary," says our master Diderot, 
" to choose between the lot of a bad but rich 
man, and that of a virtuous but unfortunate one, 
I should not hesitate. Why is the choice so 
easy ? Does it not come from the persuasion that 
there is no bad man but who has often wished to 
be good, and that no good man ever wished to be 
wicked ?" If I listen to my conscience which 
gives me as a rule of conduct, 61 Believe what you 
can, do what you ought," my conscience, which 
cannot betray me, which is myself, and the true 
word of the true God in me, I shall fly from evil 
and do good without thinking any more of para- 
dise than of hell.*" 



* " Allez, laches humains, que les feux eternels 

Empechent d'assouvir vos desirs criminels, 

Vos austeres vertus n'en ont que Tapparence. 

Mais nous, qui renoncons a toute recompense, 

Nous qui ne croyons point aux eternels tourments 

L'interet n'a jamais souille nos sentiments. 

Le bien du genre humain, la vertu nous anime 

L'amour seul du devoir nous a fait fuir le crime. 

Oui, finissons sans trouble, et mourons sans regrets." 
* * * * * * * 

Frederick the Great. 



72 THE APOLOGY OF AN UNBELIEVER. 



And as we obey our conscience, so too, let us 
attend to the voice of science. Let us follow this 
other guide, no less trustworthy, no less sincere, 
more impartial, and often more enlightened. Let 
us never forget that it is science alone which can 
conquer superstition. Let us never forget that 
she is better able than even virtue to render 
service to society. 

" For modes of faith let graceless zealots fight, 
His can't be wrong whose life is in the right. 
In faith and hope the world will disagree, 
But all mankind's concern is charity." 

Pope. 

" That suffering is the inevitable consequence of sin, 
as surely as night follows day, is the stern yet salutary 
teaching of science. And surely if this lesson were firmly 
impressed on our minds, if we really believed in the 
certainty of punishment — that sin could not conduce to 
happiness — temptation, which is at the very root of crime 
would be cut away, and mankind must necessarily become 
more innocent. May we not however go even farther 
than this, and say that science will also render man more 
virtuous." (Sir J. Lubbock, Prehistoric Times). See too 
his quotation from Lord Brougham, that science would 
not only " make our lives more agreeable, but better - % 
and that a rational being is bound by every motive of 
interest and duty, to direct his mind towards pursuits 
which are found to be the sure path of virtue as well as 
of happiness." (Lord Brougham, Objects, Advantages, 
and Pleasures of Science, p. 39). 



CONCLUSION. 



73 



. " The two oldest, greatest, most widely-spread 
evils," [intolerance and war], says Buckle, " which 
have ever been known, are constantly, though, on 
the whole, slowly, diminishing; and their dimi- 
nution has been effected, not at all by moral feel- 
ings, nor by moral teachings, but solely by the 
activity of the human intellect, and by the inven- 
tions and discoveries which, in a long course of 
successive ages, man has been able to make." 
{History of Civilisation, vol. i. p. 204, 8vo. ed.) 

And Cuvier too, said, "The good we do men, 
however great it may be, is but transitory; the 
truths we bequeath them are eternal." So, like 
science and with science, let us resolutely put 
aside all that is supernatural, much more all 
that is divine.* Like her, let us seek for truth, 
justice, happiness itself in that which is natural, 
in that which is human. We are on the earth, 
let us cease aspiring to heaven. Let us cease 
making gods of ourselves, let us be, and remain 
men. 

Goethe has written somewhere, " The denial of 



* " Why do bodies gravitate one towards another I 
Because God so willed it, said they of old ; Because they 
attract one another, says science."— L^mennais. 



74 THE APOLOGY OF AN UNBELIEVER. 

the ordinary belief can only lead to good, when the 
thinking powers are strong. Reason alone is 
worthy to succeed to the religion of duty/' I do 
not dispute it; but Goethe himself has given us 
the answer to his own objection. A very devout 
lady said to him one day, " Since you believe 
neither in Providence, nor the soul, nor the life 
to come, what can be your end in the present 
life ? 

He answered — " To improve oneself/' 
The reply is a happy one, but it is possible, I 
think, to give to life a still larger range; and, at 
the same time, to duty a broader foundation. If 
it be true, as Pascal has said, that humanity is 
but one vast collective being, then we men, its 
members, ought all to act for the advantage, and 
not to the detriment, of this intimate and fra- 
ternal community. Helvetius, and Mr. John 
Mill are therefore in the right when they define 
good as the useful; a noble and simple defini- 
tion, which, at the same time, gives us the 
definition of evil. 

It is hardly necessary to add that there is here 
no question of particular, personal and selfish 
utility, but of common, general and reciprocal 
usefulness. Let me explain my meaning by an 



CONCLUSION. 



75 



instance. Why was the devotion of Codrus and 
of Decius admired so highly by their fellow- 
countrymen, that divine honours were decreed 
them. This self- sacrifice, in the opinion of the 
King of Athens and the Roman Consul, as of all 
those who expected to profit by it, was eminently 
beautiful and virtuous, inasmuch as it was emi- 
nently useful ; one man sacrificing himself for a 
whole people, a single life redeeming thousands 
of lives. When we read in Virgil the touching 
episode of Nisus and Euryalus, " Me, me, adsum 
qui feci/' we are undoubtedly touched by this 
tender affection, which makes a friend wish to 
die in place of his friend, but we do not exactly 
admire it, because from this exchange of one life 
for another no advantages arise for humanity. 
On the other hand, we admire the Chevalier 
d'Assas, <f A moi, Auvergne, voila Pennemi ! " 
because, without the spur of a lively affection, he 
chose to die in the ambuscade into which he had 
fallen, in order to warn and save his regiment. 
He too gave one life for many, the larger interest 
triumphed over the narrower one. It is then, on 
the basis of utility, understood and practised in a 
moral as well as in a physical sense, on this 
larger basis, replacing the narrow and selfish 



76 THE APOLOGY OF AN UNBELIEVER. 



calculations of the Christian,* his personal sal- 
vation, that u morality, independent of religion," 
should establish itself, independent of the com- 
mands of dogma, and of the fear of punishment 
or hope of reward. And when the time comes 
for religions to disappear, — I mean religions which 
have for principle and sanction the supernatural, 
the divine, — a new one will establish itself among 
men with only one dogma, " The Good is common 
utility," which is called by another name justice,! 
which in its turn takes the threefold title of 
freedom, equality, brotherhood. So, then, all the 
gospel of humanity would be contained in the 
verse. 

" II se faut entr' aider, c'est la loi de nature." 

And now, to conclude, listen to a philosopher 
working out the same idea with all the eloquence 
of conviction. It is Emile Littre, the Saint Paul 
of the positive philosophy, who speaks. 



* " So then, religion is nothing more than a calculation 
of infinite and finite quantities ; vice is nothing more 
than a grand imprudence ; and heaven is nothing more 
than selfishness rewarded with eternal well being." — Rev. 
F. W. Robertson's Sermons. 

t " Be just ; justice is piety." — -Koran, S. V . v. 2. 



CONCLUSION. 



77 



" If it is certain that in the order of knowledge 
truth is sought for herself, and for no other 
reward than the satisfaction of having found her, 
so too in moral matters, the right is sought for 
itself, and with no other reward than that of 
having practised it. Assuredly no one will insult 
the right by preferring truth to it, or by allowing 
it less influence over conscience, than truth over 
the intellect. Thanks to this lofty disinterestedness, 
the highest social virtues begin to be required of 
men. The poet of Henry IV. and of Lewis 
XIII., exclaimed, ' Anew sorrow appears among 
men/ To-day, with a new future before us, I 
can reverse this mournful verse and say, ' A new 
joy appears among men/ — devotion to humanity. 
Happy are they who can render it brilliant ser- 
vices, Happy too are they who devote to it the 
never-ceasing service of an honest life and of 
honest work. For we can make no better offering 
to humanitv than an honest and laborious life." 




LONDON : 

WERTHEIMER, LEA AND CO., PRINTERS, 
FINSBURY CIRCUS. 



LIST OF WORKS 



PUBLISHED Br 

TJRUBNEE & CO., 

60, PATERNOSTER ROW. 



CranbrOOk. — Credlbilia; or, Discourses on Ques- 
tions of Christian Faith. By the Rev. James Cranbrook 
Edinburgh. Re-issue. Post 8vo., pp. iv. and 190. Cloth' 
1868, 3*. 6d. 

Cranbrook. — The Founders of Christianity ; or, 
Discourses upon the Origin of the Christian Religion. By 
the Rev. James Cranbrook, Edinburgh. Post 8vo., pp. xii. 
and 324. Cloth. 1868. 6s. 

Eenan. — The Life of Jesus. By Ernest Eenan. 
Authorised English Translation. 8vo., pp. xii. and 311. 
Cloth. 10s. 6d. 

Eenan. — Crown 8vo., pp. xii. and 311. Cloth. New 

edition. 1867. 2s. 6d. 

Newman. — Theism, Doctrinal and Practical ; or, 
Didactic Religious Utterances. By Francis "W. Newman. 
4to., pp. 184. Cloth. 1858. 8s. 6d. 

Newman. — The Sotjl : her Sorrows and her Aspira- 
tions. An Essay towards the Natural History of the Soul 
as the Basis of Theology. By Francis William Newman, 
formerly Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford. New edition. 
Post 8vo., pp. xi. and 162. Cloth. Zs. 6d. 

Newman. — A Discourse against Hero-making in 
Religion, delivered in South Place, Finsbury. By Francis 
W. Newman. Printed by request, with enlargements. 8vo., 
pp. 30. Sewed. 1864. Is. 

Newman. — Phases of Faith ; or, Passages from the 
History of my Creed. New edition. With Reply to Pro- 
fessor Henry Rogers, author of the " Eclipse of Faith." 
Crown 8vo., pp. 212. Cloth. 1865. 3s. bd. 



Publications of Triilner Sf Co. 



Parker. — Lessons from the World op Matter and 
the World op Man, being Selections from the Unpublished 
Sermons of Theodore Parker. By Rufus Leighton, and 
edited by Frances Power Cobbe. Post 8vo., pp. xix. and 
332. Cloth. 1865. 7s. 6d. 

Parker. — The Collected Works of Theodore 
Parker, Minister of the Twenty-eighth Congregational So- 
ciety at Boston, U.S. ; containing his Theological, Polemical, 
and Critical Writings, Sermons, Speeches, Addresses, and 
Literary Miscellanies. Edited by Frances Power Cobbe. 
In 12 vols. 8vo. 



Vol. I.— Containing Discourses of 
Matters pertaining to Religion ; 
with Preface by the Editor, and a 
Portrait of Parker from a Medal- 
lion by Saulini. Pp. 384. Cloth, 65. 

Vol. II. — Containing Ten Ser- 
mons and Prayers. Pp. 368. Cloth- 
Price 6s. 

Vol. III. — Containing Discourses 
of Theology. Pp.326. Cloth. Price 

65. 

Vol. IV. — Containing Discourses 
of Politics. Pp. 320. Cloih. Price 

65. 

Vol. V. — Containing Discourses 
of Slavery. Vol.1. Pp.336. Cloth. 
Price 6s. 



Vol. VI.— Containing Discourses 
of Slavery. Vol.11. Pp.330. Cloth. 
Price 65. 

Vol. VII.— Containing Discourses 
of Social Science. Pp. 304. Cloth. 
Price 65. 

Vol. VIII.— Containing Miscella. 
neous Discourses. Pp. 226. Cloth- 
Price 65. 

Vols. IX. & X.— Containing Cri- 
tical Writings. Vols. I. & II. Pp. 
298, 316. Cloth. 65. each. 

Vol. XL— Sermons on Theism, 
Atheism, and Popular Religion. 
Pp. 316. Cloth. Price 65. 

Vol. XII.— Containing Autobio- 
graphical and Miscellaneous Pieces. 
Pp. 364. Cloth. Price 65. 



Greg.— -The Creed of Christendom : its Founda- 
tion and Superstructure. By William Rathbone Greg. 
Second edition. Crown 8vo., pp. xx. and 280. Cloth. 
1863. 6.9. 

Feuerbach, — The Essence of Christianity. By 
Ludwig Feuerbach. Translated from the second German 
edition, by Marian Evans, Translator of Strauss' s " Life of 
Jesus." Large post 8vo., pp. xx. and 340. Cloth. 1864. 
10s. 6d. 

Smith. — The Divine Government. By Southwood 
Smith, M.D. Fifth edition. Crown 8vo., pp. xii. and 276. 
Cloth. 1866. 6s. 

Book of God. — The Apocalypse of Adam Cannes. 

Post 8vo., pp. 648. Cloth. 1867. 12s. 6d. 



Book of God. — An Introduction to the Apocalypse. 
In 1 vol., crown 8vo., pp. iv. and 752. Cloth. 14s. 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: Feb. 2005 

PreservationTechnologies 

A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATION 

1 1 1 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township, PA 16066 
(724) 779-2111 



f 



